Wednesday, June 06, 2012

Just throwing that in there

From an article about California's disastrous high-speed rail boondoggle that appears in the conservative British newspaper The Telegraph, an amusing observation:

Construction is expected to begin later this year in the middle of California's Central Valley near Merced, a town of 80,000 people known for having one of the highest home foreclosure rates in America.

I have heard that Merced is lovely this time of year, though:

Welcome to Merced. Mind the gap.

Actually, the high speed rail line is a real innovation, as the article points out:

Ambitious plans for a fast track linking Los Angeles and San Francisco at speeds of up to 220mph in just over two-and-a-half hours were slimly approved by 53 per cent in a statewide ballot in 2008.

I'll admit -- 220mph is pretty darned fast, and it would be nice to get from L.A. to San Francisco in 2 1/2 hours. That would be nifty. You might ask, what is the flight time between the two cities? It varies, but generally it's about an hour. Just throwing that in there, too.

Oh, and the cost of this high speed rail line? Oh, about $68 billion. But it will be worth it to see Merced.

15 comments:

Anonymous
said...

So here's the other question: who the heck wants to go to EITHER LA or SF, let alone Merced? It's like an express train to HL, both ways.

Then there's the math problem. At $100 each way (slightly less than airfare), how many people have to ride to pay off just the construction cost? Answer: 17 times the whole population of California. At 400 people per trainload, that's 1.7 million trips. At, say, 17 trips per day (roughly one per hour), that gives us a payback in 100,000 days or 273 years (and about 4 months). Yep, that sounds about right for a gold-plated boondoggle.

And per what Mr. Ewing notes, the riders need to take an hour to the station, find a way to get around when they get there (another hour or so), and in doing so they're not necessarily taking the most direct route.

In short, it's about equal to driving, and at the cost of building about ten or twenty new airports. Oops.

2) Have you ever driven in Southern California? It can take two and a half hours just to get across town.

3) You cannot pave your way out of traffic. More roads = more cars on them.

4) You may not care for LA or SF, but the 30 million or so people that live in and around them suggest that someone likes them quite a lot.

5) Arguments against public transportation infrastructure are overly premised on current trends of usage. People use their cars because alternatives do not exist. Cities and suburbs are laid out for cars because people use their cars because alternatives do not exist. Create viable alternatives, and people tend to take advantage of them. Cities and regions change. Behaviors change.

6) Every argument made against high speed rail could have been against the Interstate system half a century ago: it's insanely expensive, there's no indication that people will use it enough to make the investment worthwhile, most of its milage will pass through places nobody wants to go in order to connect the places that they do.

At least the gas taxes make it so the interstate pays for itself. In fact it more than pays for itself, since money is often siphoned off for crap like that rail project.

There is no justifiable reason to spend that money to build that railroad. The first poster shows you the numbers. I'm willing to bet that the fare income doesn't even cover the operating costs.

The only people who should support this railroad are people who have their hand in the trough of money that is being used to build it. For everyone else, this is nothing more than a drain on resources that would be better spend elsewhere.

Brian I know that I'm not always consistent with my logic, but I've never purported to be a logical person, while you have. You use logic when you argue against religeon, but throw all logic out the window when it comes to this. How is that?

@ Anon--are you seriously suggesting that roads run at a net profit to the states/municipalities that build and maintain them? When you can back that up, we'll address my logic or perceived lack thereof.

The comparison I was making was with planes. There is regular, fairly cheap service between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Even factoring the time it takes to get in and out of the airports, it's still going to be a lot faster to get between the two cities by air. And unless the gubmint subsidizes the hell out of the fare, the train ticket is likely to be as expensive as a plane ticket. In fact, I'd expect it to be more expensive. And when you think about what your time is worth, it makes even less sense.

We've been through this before. Trains make sense in certain places. I lived in Chicago for five years and the train system worked well, but it was because of two things: the geographic nature of Chicago, which sits on a huge lake; and that the city grew up along existing rail lines. Same thing happened in Philadelphia. In other words, rail makes sense for short trips in congested areas. It doesn't make much sense in California.

As for the interstate, the primary reason it was built wasn't to provide a way for me to get from Minneapolis to Madison or Chicago. It was built as much for perceived national defense needs as anything else. That it is also a magnificent way for cititzens to move around, as well as a magnificent way for freight to move from point to point, is a bonus.

Brian is right about roads costing money, but you can't just stop there-- the question is how much money compared to alternatives? For example, Twin Cities light rail carries less than 1% of total trips in the metro at a cost, just to build, that would have added 4 additional lanes to every freeway in the metro, which carry roughly 95% of all trips! Let's see: rail transit has a 95:1 capital cost disadvantage? Doesn't make sense.

Put it another way: The proposed CA rail line might possibly put 17 flights per day out of business. But the airports are already there, the planes already built, so you are replacing a ZERO cost option with a $68 Billion one! Again, the comparison doesn't speak highly for your logic.

Take a third example: for the cost of building the Central Corridor light rail we could have purchased, for EVERY potential rider, a new car, and for less than the operating cost, we could have put gas in those cars, too. Or if you must have mass transit, we could run a fleet of high-tech hybrid busses up and down that line, two minutes apart, for the next 700 years! Logic isn't enough without a few actual FACTS to apply it to.

Indeed you did not. But my point in bringing that up is that public works generally don't pay for themselves. That's why they are public. And while you haven't explicitly argued in favor of car-based infrastructure here, that is the status quo, so arguing against change (or more accurately, augmentation) is essentially an argument for the status quo (highways) by default.

As for planes: tack at least an hour onto the front of that trip, flights are less frequent, much less flexible in terms of last-minute booking (unless money is no object to you) and you have the exact same problem of in-city transport at the other end as you do with a train.

Your point about the interstates actually reinforces my own: there can be positive returns to public works that aren't even anticipated in their conception. Maybe high-speed rail between cites will encourage more travel and commerce between regions, providing new revenue streams to both areas. Maybe it will revitalize communities like Merced.

Generally speaking, more and better connections make richer, more mobile, and more productive.

much less flexible in terms of last-minute booking (unless money is no object to you)

Yes and no. It's a lucrative run and airlines compete for passengers, especially business passengers. That brings costs down. And for a business passenger, the hour or two saved in travel time is quite valuable.

Maybe high-speed rail between cites will encourage more travel and commerce between regions, providing new revenue streams to both areas. Maybe it will revitalize communities like Merced.

Maybe is fine, but when it comes with a $68b price tag, especially in a state that's already bankrupt, it's an awfully expensive maybe.

. People use their cars because alternatives do not exist. Cities and suburbs are laid out for cars because people use their cars because alternatives do not exist. Create viable alternatives, and people tend to take advantage of them.

I took the LRT to work for a couple of years because it was a bit more economical. The "experience" deteriorated for me, however, and when the Sabo bicycle bridge (oh, irony) broke, I started driving to work again and like it much better. Even with all the road construction. Yesterday I found myself shaking my head that it took me 50 minutes to get into work; and then I realized that the fastest I was ever able to get to or from work was 45 minutes if I hit it just right, and an hour if I didn't.

Also, I have traveled in Europe. The cost these days of transporting a family of four in England or Spain by train is prohibitive, and even higher than flying. Driving in England is unpleasant because they've deliberately made it so with their laws, and yet people still jam the motorways (even with high petrol costs) because the trains are so expensive and because (my personal experience) the union rail employees are indifferent at best and obnoxious at worst. In Spain in 2009 we were able to fly from Madrid to Barcelona for roughly half what the trains cost.

so, i'm a bizness traveler: maybe a customer rep or sales guy... i need to cover this region: SF to LA and then some (dont laugh, i know those who do, and i know them well.)

after i drive to the train station in LA, park my car, and train it to SF... how the hell am i supposed to visit customers in San Jose, Gilroy, SF, Oakland, Sacramento...etc. without that car, that i left in LA?

it wont work. its a boondoggle. a pipedream in the minds of Governor's whose nicknames are similar to "Moonbeam."

after i drive to the train station in LA, park my car, and train it to SF... how the hell am i supposed to visit customers in San Jose, Gilroy, SF, Oakland, Sacramento...etc. without that car, that i left in LA?

Well, of course, you use the rental care you pick up in San Francisco. Oh, wait....

What I really wonder is what it would cost to build the train if it was subject to open bidding and not tied specifically to prevailing wage laws, union labor, political graft and other soft costs of government. The cost still wouldn't justify the project, but I'd be willing to bet that it could be built for half the cost, but that wouldn't satisfy the union slugs and others for whom the trains are really being built.